TOWAMENCIN – Instead of being filled with 3,000 students who can probably find their way around school with their eyes shut, on Thursday night North Penn High School was filled with mostly lost and confused parents for back to school night. Beginning at 7pm when the first bell rang, parents with maps in one hand and their child’s schedule in the other rushed from class to class, from K-pod to B-pod and back again.

“The school is so big you need a passport to get from pod to pod!” Dana Bower, mother of junior class president Josh Bower, exclaimed. “I only got lost once.”

Another parent, John Pogas, admitted that “it was hard to get to opposite ends of the school on time. One of my kids always has a crazy schedule where they have to do that.” This is something students know all too well.

Lucky for the parents, members of ROTC were stationed at every corner to aid parents in getting to their next class. These happy helpers were so ready to assist the parents that they even tried to help French teacher Anya Assous find her way around.

Parents like Anna Wright appreciated having the ROTC students there for directions. Wright also stated that the maps they were given were a big help in navigating the school as well.

Many parents enjoy going to back to school night and meeting their children’s teachers and learning about the classes. But the most popular area of the night was the IMC where parents were able to send their kids slips for cookies from the cookie corner. Even the parents must know how much students love those cookies.

One of the only complaints about the night was that there was not enough time in between classes, and everything was too rushed. That’s a common complaint from the students as well. Somehow, though, most manage to get to their classes in the allotted four minutes or less. Perhaps that is a learned behavior.

In the end, back to school night went very smoothly, except as always, for the amount of traffic trying to get out of the parking lot, which is yet another thing the students are more than used to. And that’s what back to school night is for- parents learning about what their kids do and go through every day, and that includes traffic jams in the parking lot- and in the hallways.